Forte had taken the Potential Guidance session, same as Mizuki — no superpower awakening, but the physical foundation that the guidance built upon was now running at a different ceiling than before. Both of them had tested it. It showed.
Glasses had finished loading.
The electric current moved through him in the way it had started moving since the morning of his awakening — dense, full-body, the cellular friction audible as a low crackle before the actual discharge became visible. He ran at Centipede Junior with the focused intent of someone who had decided that hesitation was a resource he didn't have.
The rest of the field moved with him.
The trainees went forward in the way that a wave goes forward — not organized, not disciplined in the military sense, but unified in direction and purpose, a dozen-plus people who had been training together for a month and had arrived at the same conclusion about what happened next.
Below the surface, the scarlet light in the centipede monsters' eyes went dark.
The rotating pattern disappeared. Centipede Junior and Senior found themselves on open ground, surrounded by the ruins of a city they had apparently been about to be in, with no clear account of how they'd arrived at the surface.
Junior looked at Senior.
"What — what's happening?"
Senior processed its surroundings for approximately one second. Its monster instincts arrived at the relevant conclusion before its limited higher cognition did.
"Doesn't matter. Exterminate humanity."
Both opened their mandibles and moved.
Mumen Rider and Glasses hit the vanguard line simultaneously — two vectors aimed at two targets, close enough to coordinated that anyone watching might have thought they'd planned it.
Glasses drove a plasma-charged punch into Centipede Junior's underside that flipped the creature fully onto its back, legs cycling against nothing, the Tiger-level carapace cracking at the impact point.
Mumen Rider went for Senior — grabbed its head section with both hands while the suit's vibranium layer absorbed the counter-pressure, and drove it into the rubble at his feet with the full assist of the thruster array firing simultaneously.
The ruins registered both impacts.
Behind them, three black arcs closed the distance at a pace that most of the assembled heroes could track but not quite follow — the Potential Guidance enhancement showing as a quality of movement rather than simply speed.
Bushidrill's drill strike was already rotating at operational velocity before he committed to the approach vector. Iaian's sword had cleared its scabbard before anyone had time to announce it. Okamaitachi moved with the economy of someone who had practiced the sequence many times and had learned which parts to skip.
"Drill Advance!"
"Aerial Slash!"
Three lines of light crossed Centipede Junior in the time it took for the creature to process that the first punch had connected. The cuts ran clean and deep, the Potential Guidance enhancement giving each strike the reach and authority to actually penetrate a Tiger-level carapace rather than score it.
Three wounds. Through the body.
Centipede Junior froze in the specific way that things freeze when the damage has already happened and the nervous system is receiving the notification.
Bushidrill's follow-up came through the creature's face — the grotesque human-adjacent features that hadn't fully solidified yet from the latest molt — at the apex of his drill's rotation. The penetration was clean and final.
Centipede Junior settled.
"...That's it?"
"It's — it died that fast?"
The heroes who were still closing the distance had to revise their pacing on the fly, which was not an unwelcome revision. Several of them arrived at the conclusion within the same second: Tiger-level threats were within their capability set. The training program had moved them there. And Ghost-level Senior Centipede, currently being occupied by Mumen Rider and Glasses, was a Ghost-level threat that the entire remaining group would be applying themselves to.
The light in every pair of eyes that turned toward Senior Centipede had a quality that the creature, operating on instinct rather than threat assessment, registered as wrong in a way it couldn't immediately categorize.
These humans are not behaving correctly, was approximately the thought available to it.
They're excited.
Senior Centipede fought with the tools it had — hard shell, regenerative capacity, the natural advantages of its size and segment count. Its legs shed and regrew through several cycles as the first wave of combined hero attacks worked through its available surface area. Even Ghost-level durability has a fatigue rate under sustained multi-point engagement, and the heroes pressing it knew how to maintain sustained multi-point engagement because they'd been trained specifically on that.
Above, Elder Centipede caught its eyes drifting downward — the distant sounds of the smaller fight drawing some peripheral attention — and paid for the lapse immediately. King's fist connected with one of its foremost appendages mid-distraction and took it off at the joint.
It didn't grow back fast enough to matter. Elder Centipede redirected its attention upward.
Those two will fall eventually, it noted, without particular investment. Everything does.
The centipede monsters were the same species, not the same bloodline. The Elder bore them no specific attachment. They had emerged from the same underground ecosystem by coincidence of circumstance, not lineage, and Elder Centipede had not been tracking their operational status before now.
It wasn't going to start.
The exchange above the ruins had been running for long enough that the pattern was clear to everyone involved.
King could punch through the defense. The Elder Centipede could regenerate faster than the punch-through could become a kill. Atomic Samurai's Atomic Slash could cover more surface area in a single release than King's fist, but the blade-to-body contact time was shorter, and the wounds were closing before the cutting force could accumulate to a decisive threshold. Cutting it in half would work in theory. In practice, the two halves would begin connecting again in under a second — new growth buds extending from each edge, threading together, sealing the gap before gravity had finished deciding where the pieces would land.
The math was unfavorable and everyone involved knew it.
Atomic Samurai's sword had bounced off the regenerated shell for the fourth time in the last two minutes. He looked at it with the expression of a craftsman whose tool is functionally correct and the material is simply wrong.
If I cut it into a hundred pieces at once, he was thinking, maybe. But the coverage radius required for that—
Jordan's voice came through the Mind Network's directed channel, precise and clear, dropping a position marker into the tactical awareness of all three combatants simultaneously.
"Noted position in the ruins. Please move the target to that location. We have a method."
Atomic Samurai let out a breath that had been waiting for an exit.
"Finally." He sheathed, pulled back from Elder Centipede's immediate range, and began the considerably easier task of encouraging a Dragon-level monster to move in a specific direction rather than defeating it. "Two minutes. I just need two minutes."
King received the same instruction through the Mind Network and immediately began reorienting — his attacks shifting from damage to displacement, landing where they would push rather than where they would theoretically penetrate. His power at 250,000 horsepower-plus was more than enough for that function. The technique was still developing — self-taught at this scale, the application occasionally more forceful than necessary — but the basic requirement of move the target was within reliable parameters.
Genos, his core recovering from the overload's red-temperature phase in measured increments, rejoined from altitude. Not at full capacity. Close enough.
"Together," King said.
Genos charged what was available. King loaded a full-extension punch.
The combined output hit Elder Centipede's head from two angles at the same time — golden electromagnetic discharge and orange incineration fire meeting at the creature's face, the intersection point producing a flash that lit the underside of the cloud cover Bang had generated.
Half the face came apart.
Elder Centipede's direction of travel was the direction they needed it to go.
Below, Jordan nudged Saitama.
"Ready?"
Saitama had been rotating his shoulder with the patient focus of someone for whom the warmup was the only preparation required and who had been doing it long enough to know that.
"Yeah." He looked at the shape moving through the ruins toward their position, its scale filling the gaps between the remaining structures. "I had a feeling this one was mine."
Jordan nodded. "It's yours."
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